My understanding is that the Cavendish is very fragile and ripens rather quickly. However, there is currently a tremendous amount of infrastructure dedicated to "babying" the Cavendish in order to make it viable. For example, lots of refrigerated transport and storage (read: expensive). But the Cavendish keeps working because the process is in place. It's cheaper to keep it working than switch to a different species with different needs.

The success of the Cavendish is not because it's inherently resilient but because a tremendous amount of effort was put into making it work.